The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In military and commercial mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), network nodes typically transmit and receive signals through air. In such circumstances network security may be a concern, bandwidth may be limited, and network traffic may be likely to congest. Providing Quality of Service (QoS) in such networks can be complicated by rapidly varying link quality bit error rate (BER), limited bandwidth, and topology changes in the MANET environment.
Two independent high-level prioritization methods have been specified for use in military MANETs to provide Quality of Service (QoS). One prioritization method is DiffServ (Differentiated Services), which evolved out of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). DiffServ has typically been used in commercial applications on the Internet. In DiffServ a transmission is accorded a priority level based on the urgency of the transmission. The second prioritization method is MLPP (Multi-Layer Precedence and Preemption), which is used by the United States Department of Defense (DoD). MLPP was developed for use in military circuit-switched voice networks. In MLPP a transmission is accorded a priority level based on transmission importance.
These two approaches to prioritization, urgency versus importance, are independent, mutually exclusive, and thus orthogonal to each other. For example, a communication may be of high importance, but it may or may not be urgent, e.g., paying a bill by the end of the month may be important, but not urgent at the beginning of the month. On the other hand, a communication may be urgent or require timeliness or rapid response-time, but it may or may not be important, e.g., a non-important real-time voice conversation requires almost immediate delivery for a two-way conversation to take place. Current network implementations use either one type of prioritization or the other, but generally not both.